Saving Elijah

chords and smiled. "Well, too bad. That one is something to see. Of course, it's just as well you didn't."
    "Why?"
    "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Once you see the Angel of Death, that's it for you. It's the eternal dirt nap. The house of perpetual un-motion."
    " You seem to be kicking around and in motion," I said.
    "You think this is fun? You try it for a while, let alone forever." He leaned toward me. "Want to trade places?"
    "No thanks. How did you know Jimmy was going to die?"
    "I already told you. The dead know everything the living don't. If you want to know what I really think, the living are jealous of the dead."
    "Why?"
    "Because they're always speculating about the dead. N'est-ce pas?"
    "Why didn't you do something for Jimmy? You said you know the secret of how to escape the Angel."
    His laugh began as a twittering sound, then escalated, and I heard other sounds, hee-hawing like a donkey, cackling like a coop full of hens. Were those bees buzzing?
    "Why would I?"
    "Just to be kind."
    His eyebrows drew together, and it occurred to me that his changes of expression were more like rearrangements of a still life.
    "Kind to who?" he said.
    "Kind to Jimmy. To his parents. To his sister."
    "Well, aren't we the compassionate one?" He made a sound like the clearing of a throat. "Excuse me, kind to whom? That man always corrected him when he made grammatical mistakes."
    "What man?"
    "The man who was this spirit's father, when the spirit was alive. Oh yes. He was never good enough for his father, but take it from me, this miserable wreck was once a human being—and quite a handsome human being, if I do say so myself. Tempted all the young women. They swarmed  around him like bees to honey, as a matter of fact." He strutted, holding his arms out, preening like a drag queen.
    I stared at him until he stopped and came back.
    "Of course, now he's all shriveled and putrid, and he stinks, and all his cavities and organs are positively crawling. C'est dommage, his flesh only tempts tiny insects and wriggling creatures now." He wiggled his fingers. "Or, as Baudelaire put it, de noirs bataillons, de lanes, battalions of black larvae."
    Well. I had met up with a ghost who quoted Baudelaire.
    "Of course," he said, "all of that is shuttled away in the ground, so the living don't have to witness the processes by which flesh becomes one with the soil."
    "That's because it's repulsive," I said.
    A shrug, like the winking of air. "Never lost a moment's sleep over it myself."
    "Do ghosts sleep?"
    "Ho, hum. Oh yes, a permanent siesta, a happy slumber. I only meant it doesn't matter a bit to me, all that crawling putrescence. Would have been a lot easier, though, if I could have used what was left of his body. Of course, then you wouldn't be sitting here talking to me. You'd be regurgitating. Tee, hee."
    "Human beings don't want to think about what happens to their bodies after they die. It's too horrible."
    "Well, you're going to think about it plenty, Dinah. Mothers can't help it. They think about their babies in the ground all the time. Just remember your Grandmother Elizabeth."
    Yes. I remembered.
    "Never goes away. Never, never."
    "What are you saying?"
    "Oh nothing. Nothing. You're not afraid of me, are you?"
    "You're nothing in comparison," I told him.
    He laughed. "I know, I know. I'm counting on that."
    "Wait a minute. Should I be afraid of you?"
    "Absolutely not." His words rang loud and sonorous. True words or lies?
    "Did you ever hear the one about the man who stayed overnight in the cemetery and overheard two ghosts talking—"
    "Please. I'm in no mood for jokes."
    "This is no joke. It's a story. So the man heard one ghost tell the other that hail would destroy the crops of anyone who sowed at the first rainfall. And so the man went and sowed at the second rainfall, and everyone's crops were destroyed, except his."
    "What's the point?"
    His face reorganized itself into an expression of disappointment. "I don't know. Does there have to be a point?"
    "You're saying I shouldn't be afraid of you. And you can help me. Right?"
    "Up to you."
    "This has to be a dream. How can a dream help me?"
    "A dream, is it? 'All my days are trances, and all my nightly dreams'? That's Poe, you know. Well, certainly you know. Poe was one of your favorites, was he not? So. Which part of this is the dream, and which part the trance, and which part the reality?"
    "The part where Dr. Angus comes in and says those awful things about Elijah is the